A court in New Delhi on Monday sentenced Medha Patkar to a five-month jail term. This is in a defamation case filed in 2000 by VK Saxena, who is now lieutenant governor of Delhi.

I read this news and my mind rolled all the way back to 10 November of 2000. That day, the Indian Express carried a large advertisement on page five, an ad that has an intimate connection to this defamation case.

I wrote about that ad in my book The Narmada Dammed (Penguin, 2002). What follows is the relevant excerpt from the book, lightly edited:

Someone I will call Mr X, President of the “National Council for Civil Liberties” of Ahmedabad, was responsible for the ad. “True face of Ms Medha Patkar and her NBA” or Narmada Bachao Andolan, it proclaimed. It presented to credulous readers two facets of this “true face”.

The first: “NBA is passing on confidential documents related to projects of national importance to the [sic] foreign people.” Reading those words, you were meant to bristle with righteous rage at the Narmada Bachao Andolan good-for-nothings who would pass national secrets to foreigners. The “proof”? An “e-mail message” from “Ms Chitra Rupa Palit of NBA”, to two Swiss gentlemen, reproduced immediately below.

The sender’s name, as written on that very “e-mail message”, is “Chittaroopa”, not “Chitra Rupa”, but let’s gloss over that little detail. Just what did Ms Palit, an Narmada Bachao Andolan activist from Madhya Pradesh, write to the Swiss gentlemen? This dangerous admission: “I am enclosing the (confidential) Risk analysis document that we have prepared.” [Emphasis added].

That is, Ms Palit is referring to a document the Narmada Bachao Andolan had itself produced. How that qualifies as a national secret, Mr X and the National Council for Civil Liberties do not explain. And why should they explain? Their purpose has been served. They have painted the Narmada Bachao Andolan as treasonous in your eyes. You, who saw the ad, were not meant to actually read Ms Palit’s “e-mail message”.

The second: the Narmada Bachao Andolan supports itself “through hawala transactions”. Hawala, as we once know well, refers to undeclared transactions in foreign exchange, on foreign soil. And what's the proof this time? A letter from a Nashik organisation called Lok Samiti to a company, thanking the company for its donation of some thousands of rupees. (A second inference you are supposed to make is that Lok Samiti is a mere front for the Narmada Bachao Andolan, allowing the Andolan to collect funds on the quiet.)

But the third line – yes, the third line – in that letter mentions the Narmada Bachao Andolan, explicitly saying that the funds are for the Narmada Bachao Andolan. In what sense, then, is the Narmada Bachao Andolan taking these funds on the quiet? Besides, Lok Samiti is an Indian organisation, in an Indian city, taking Indian rupees, issuing an Indian receipt, and handing the rupees over to another Indian organisation. In what sense is this a transaction in another country involving undeclared foreign currency, ie a “hawala transaction”?

Yet why should Mr X and the National Council for Civil Liberties care about answering those questions? They have put the idea of a hawala-tainted Narmada Bachao Andolan in your mind, have they not? Their purpose, served again. No, you were not meant to actually read the ad.

Perhaps most telling of all is a line at the bottom of the ad. “Space donated by a Patriot”, it says.

It makes me wonder. If patriots must seek to win public favour this way, we have slid a long way indeed from the times of Azad and Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. Someone save us from bumbling patriots.

But ordinarily, this ad may not have been particularly worth noticing. After all, over the years many people have made accusations about the Narmada Bachao Andolan and its activists. Besides, if a private organisation makes such comments, what does that have to do with the government?

There’s a reason to ask that. Because just months later, there was a follow-up to this ad that brought everything together.

The very same National Council for Civil Liberties submitted a memorandum to Home Minister LK Advani. It asked him to ban the Narmada Bachao Andolan under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1957. An entire raft of politicians signed the memorandum to support the National Council for Civil Liberties demand: then Gujarat heavyweights Amarsinh Choudhary, Shankarsinh Vaghela, Dilip Parikh, Chhabildas Mehta and Suresh Mehta, Madhya Pradesh’s then Deputy Chief Minister Jamuna Devi and the then president of the Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee, Radhakishan Malviya.

As Ashish Kothari wrote in Frontline:

“The memorandum...was reportedly submitted with details of NBA alleged subversive activities: foreign funding, passing on confidential reports related to important projects of the country to foreign agencies, human rights violations in the Narmada Valley, evasion of income tax, and letting loose a reign of violence against the project-affected persons and even government officials engaged in survey and rehabilitation work in the valley. NCCL president [Mr X] was also quoted as threatening to move the High Court if the Central government delayed imposing the ban on the NBA.”

As you can see, Mr X remained confident that nobody had actually read his ad and so discovered how hollow were his allegations about foreign funding and passing on secrets.

I don’t intend to mount here a detailed defense of the Narmada Bachao Andolan against this memorandum. Still, this ties right in with the “Space donated by a Patriot” line at the bottom of the ad. The whole demand for a ban implies that disagreeing with the state is not just an unlawful activity that must be prevented, it is also traitorous. Again as Kothari writes:

“There is an unwritten assumption that the state can do no wrong, and that anything it does must be in the ‘national’ interest. Such faith in the Indian state is indeed touching. If the interests of those behind such demands were not clear, one would even be driven to tears by such blind faith.”

Truly: if our experience of over seven decades tells us anything, it is that the state can indeed do wrong. You don’t need to fight a dam to know that.

So just who was this Mr X? His name: VK Saxena. Elevated, since these events from nearly a quarter-century ago, to lieutenant governor of Delhi.

Again as Ashish Kothari also wrote, in the same article: “The NBA has filed a criminal suit against VK Saxena of the NCCL ... One hopes that the courts will have the honesty and courage to prosecute these self-styled upholders of morality and expose them.”

About honesty and courage and morality, judge for yourself.

Dilip D’Souza’s most recent book is Roadwalker: A Few Miles on the Bharat Jodo Yatra.